Afternoon Men was published by Duckworth in 1931, when Powell was twenty-five. The novel follows William Atwater, a young museum employee, through a series of parties, pub evenings, and desultory love affairs in London and on the Suffolk coast. The characters are young, educated, and profoundly aimless — they drink, flirt, quarrel, and reconcile with a repetitiveness that is simultaneously comic and melancholy.
The novel’s style is strikingly different from the Dance — short sentences, minimal description, dialogue that sounds like recorded speech. The debt to Hemingway and the early Evelyn Waugh is evident, but Powell’s sensibility is cooler than either. Where Hemingway’s characters suffer heroically and Waugh’s characters suffer farcically, Powell’s characters simply drift, and the novel’s power comes from the accumulation of small, perfectly observed social interactions that add up to a portrait of a generation suspended between wars, between classes, and between the desire to do something and the inability to figure out what.
The novel was well received on publication — critics noted Powell’s ear for dialogue and his gift for social comedy — but it was the Dance that would fulfill the promise of this early work. Afternoon Men remains readable as a minor classic of early 1930s fiction and as an early study of the social world that Powell would later anatomize at epic length.
Collecting Afternoon Men
First edition (Duckworth, London, 1931): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $1,000–$3,000
- Very good/very good: $400–$1,000
- Good/no jacket: $100–$300